Maker Education is such a valuable role. These stories will bring you the latest information and tales of maker educators who area spreading the maker mindset. Help others learn how to make things or how to think like a maker at makerspaces, schools, universities, and local communities. The importance of maker education can not be understated. We appreciate our educators.
Kyle Lawson and James Peyer discuss their innovative strategy to get biotechnology into schools and hackerspaces. Their company otyp was formed with the purpose of making equipment and information accessible to anyone who wants to get started with genetic research and experiments.
Making is as much about exploring as it is about building. Exploring new ways of problem-solving, understanding how things are made, how machine components fit together. And this week, for me, about exploring new tools.
Chicago’s American Machine Tools Corporation buys, sells, ships, and repairs heavy machine tools all over the world. They also maintain a curriculum of free, online, non-brand-specific operator education materials, including the best general How to Use a Milling Machine page I’ve seen. There are no videos, but personally I prefer old-fashioned text and diagrams for this purpose. If you are interested in movies, however, check out MIT’s Introduction to the Mill.
Founded in 1906 in South Bend, Indiana, South Bend Lathe, at one time, controlled almost half of the U.S. domestic metalworking lathe market. South Bend did a lot of things right, to earn their market share and reputation, and one of the smartest was to produce clear, well-illustrated, low-cost instructional materials describing not just how to set up and run their tools, but how to use them to perform all kinds of basic and advanced machining operations.
Makers amaze me. I’m always in awe of how many different projects they seemed to be juggling at once. As soon as you dig into a conversation, you can usually uncover about five more that they’re mentally planning. Show them a new tool and you’ll get a list of new applications and experiments they can use it for.
Quick, handy video tutorial from Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin of tiny workshop, demonstrating a fast method of centering a piece of round stock in a 4-jaw chuck using a magnetic-mount dial indicator and a pair of chuck keys. If you’ve never seen this operation before, Jeremy’s video makes it clear and simple to understand. [Thanks, Jeremy!]
Three-jaw chucks, of the same general type used to hold bits in most power drills, are also common equipment on metalworking lathes. Though it is not necessarily so, three-jaw chucks are so commonly of the self-centering variety, in which the jaws are not independently adjustable, that “self-centering” is generally assumed from the term “three-jaw chuck.” But…
